Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg Shows and Press

So, the Charlotte Gainsbourg album, IRM, has been released in Europe. It is due out in North America in early January. So some promotions and stuff have started, including shows and TV appearences (at least in France, anyway). My understanding is that some of Beck’s band went and backed her on some shows last month, though Beck may not have been involved (see this video, which has Bram Inscore and Brian LeBarton, but no Beck). However, it appears from this blog that they are going back this week to do more, and this time Beck will be involved.

So if anyone is in France and reads this blog, and hears more or goes to any shows, please let us know. If you can record any TV appearences, tape any concerts, grab any setlists, etc. please share with us: computergirls@whiskeyclone.net.

I’ve heard IRM and I must say, I think it is quite impressive. Beck and Charlotte have done some press for the album, there’s some up on charlottegainsbourg.com. Hearing about how they collaborated was very interesting. (However, some are in French. If anyone can pull any useful info out of any interviews, or maybe links to interviews, again, drop us a line!)

UPDATE: I’ve since learned that Beck is NOT in Paris on this trip either. Whether he will be playing any shows in the future with Charlotte, I’m not sure. But as of now, we as a Beck site, don’t need to track the setlists and things. But feel free to share if anything cool pops up!

In the interview, Charlotte does confirm she will be touring in the spring with Beck’s musicians ; she is asked if Beck will be part of the tour, she answered that “no, well I don”t know, maybe for some selected dates”.

Thanks to IRM, medias here do talk a lot about Beck and it feels good as he’s really not very well know in our country ! :-(

The fact that it’s Beck who casted the band is quite good! I attended their very first concert yesterday and it was really well! 10 songs (9 from IRM and Just Like A Woman covered like on Taratata http://charlotte-gainsbourg.blogspot.com/2009/12/charlotte-gainsbourg-chante-heaven-can.html) They had to play again 4 songs because they were not satisfied with the result but things are coming and coming well. Charlotte is not often at ease but i’m sure it will come little by little. 5 songs from the show will be broacasted next week and the complete gig on January 23, 2010 on Canal +

How many French transplants and Gallic-pop devotees are living in Philadelphia?
We should get a good head count tonight, as two noted French phenoms – Charlotte Gainsbourg and Nouvelle Vague – make appearances at area clubs, forcing fans to make a difficult concertgoing decision.

While just making her Philadelphia debut tonight at the TLA, Gainsbourg is the far more recognizable talent, both for her acting (in such films as “Jane Eyre,” “Lemming” and “I’m Not There”) and for her history as a torch-bearing cabaret singer.

She comes to both callings naturally. Her father was the daring French pop star/actor Serge Gainsbourg and her mom the British model/actress Jane Birkin.

Together, that pair taught the world just how hot it could get in the boudoir with their sensual international hit “Je t’aime . . . moi non plus.” And Serge carried on for decades with an eclectic approach that merged folk, jazz, cabaret and world music influences.

Ears are likely to perk, and caution definitely will be thrown to the wind again next week, as the dreamy-voiced Charlotte and her new production collaborator, the American artist Beck, foist a most intriguing album on the world, surely the raison d’être for her first U.S. concert tour.

It really spins your head around with Beck’s sonic playpen of techy studio toys, dramatic world percussion flourishes and eerie, Third Stream/chamber pop strings arranged by Beck’s dad, David Campbell.

Beck Hansen takes all the song credits, too. But as Gainsbourg relates, she had lots of input along the way, and just her name appears on the album cover.

“I didn’t want Beck to write songs on his side and just give me the melodies to sing,” she has said. “I wanted to be involved in the creative process, too. So he ended up creating everything from scratch with me being there. He always progressed according to how I related and what I had to say.”

The creative team sensed they were onto something special (and weird) with the very first song they worked on, “Master’s Hand.”

As Beck relates, “One of the lines I came up with was ‘Drill my head full of holes/To let the memories out.’ It was a metaphorical image, but afterward the engineer said to me, ‘You know that’s what actually happened to her last year.’ And I had no idea she’d had this accident. We’d never even talked about it.” (In 2007 Gainsbourg underwent emergency surgery after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.)

“Little mysterious things like that – I liked the coincidence,” Gainsbourg said. “It had a lot to do with spontaneity and coincidence.”

(FYI, the album’s clanging, banging title track also references Gainsbourg’s medical travails. IRM is the French acronym for what we call an MRI body scan.)

Beck also was thinking some about Charlotte’s father during the making of the album.

“Most of the time, I was trying to come up with sounds that would be her own. Which is difficult, because her father covered so much ground . . . Charlotte and I adopted a lot of Serge’s North African percussion ideas for our own record.”

And while hardly retro, the high-toned aura of Campbell’s arrangements hearkens back to the musical era when folkies on both sides of the pond were going “progressive,” working with chamber ensembles under the sway of the Beatles.

Tellingly, the label that best served up that music, Elektra, has been dusted off to carry Gainsbourg and Beck’s adventurous new millennium music.